// About
The ML team you'd hire if they were available.
Small senior team in Wrocław. We embed with product teams - Brand24, SurferSEO, Comcast, Chili Piper - to ship LLMs, fine-tunes, computer vision, and the eval infrastructure that catches regressions in production.
// What we do
Two things, mostly.
Production
Building and running ML systems in production. Agents, RAG, inference optimization, observability, evals, and the on-call rotation that comes with it. Engagements run 2-12 weeks, embedded with a customer's eng lead.
Research
Hands-on ML research and prototyping. Custom fine-tunes (LoRA, QLoRA, DPO, KTO, GRPO), benchmark and eval methodology, synthetic data pipelines. Some of it ships as open source on HuggingFace; some stays inside customer products.
// Leadership
The people deciding what ships.
Karol Gawron
Co-founder · Head of R&D
Leads model and inference work. Background in academic NLP; ships the production version of what the team publishes. Forbes 30 Under 30.
LinkedIn
Michał Pogoda-Rosikon
Co-founder · CEO
Engineering and product. Owns customer-facing scoping, eval design, and the parts of the stack that have to actually run. Forbes 30 Under 30.
LinkedIn
Michał Świędrowski
Co-founder
Commercial and partnerships. Translates between what customers say they want and what actually moves the metric.
LinkedIn
Norbert Ropiak
Co-founder
[placeholder bio - replace with actual role and one-line description].
LinkedIn// Timeline
What got us here.
- 2022
Founded out of academic NLP research
Spun out of the Polish NLP research community. Initial team was published researchers who wanted to ship.
- 2023
First production engagements
Brand24, SurferSEO, Comcast - all started in this window. First open-source model crosses 100K downloads.
- 2024
DPO / preference tuning at scale
Jaskier 7B DPO family released. Production fine-tunes at SurferSEO cross 100M tokens/day.
- 2025-2026
Agentic systems, evals, observability
Brand24 Slack agent ships with sub-5s p50. Internal tooling for trace replay and trajectory evals becomes a customer-facing service.
// Recognition
External signals.
- #1 Deloitte Companies to Watch in Poland
- 13+ first-place hackathon wins (HackYeah, Supervision Hack, BCG Platinion, others)
- Models cited and used by HuggingFace community (~80K downloads/month, lifetime > 2.7M)
- 10+ peer-reviewed publications across NLP, speech, and applied ML
Where
bards.ai sp. z o.o.
ul. Wielka 67
53-340 Wrocław, Poland
Registration
KRS 0000939143
NIP 8992913362
REGON 520709530
Contact
hello@bards.ai
Reply within one business day.